- FFMPEG’s biggest speedup so far affects only one function, some must have heard
- The handwritten assembly returns to a niche filter that most users will never touch
- AVX512 gives FFMPEG an absurd 100x profit – but only if your CPU supports it
The FFMPEG project, known for providing electricity to some of the most widely used video editing software and media tools, is making headlines again.
Developers have claimed that they say “the largest speedup ever”, which recently provides 100x performance benefits in an update.
Hunt? This applies only to a single, vague function, and the means of achieving it is increasing eyebrows – handwritten assembly code, a technique that has been seen as old by most developers today.
Assembly coding sparks both nostalgia and skepticism
Legislative language, once required to exit limited hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, has become a niche practice.
Nevertheless, FFMPEG developers continue to rely on it for excessive adaptation, calling themselves “assembly agans”.
In his latest patch, he re -written a filter called rangedtect8_avx512 using AVX512 instructions, a modern simd (single instruction, multiple data) part of the toolkit that helps CPUS to perform many tasks in parallel.
On the system without AVX512 support, the AVX2 version still improves 65.63%.
As the team states, “This is a single function that is now 100x fast, not the entire FFMPEG.”
The news follows the uniform boost reported in November 2024, where another patch brought some operations faster to 94x.
In that case, the part of the earlier performance is part of the mismatch filter complicated: the generic Sea version used the 8-tap conversion, while the SIMD version used a simple 6-TAP approach.
Even compiling the C version in release mode with a better compiler such as Clang can turn off the difference more than 50%, suggesting that some of the claimed speed benefits can be exaggerated by comparing the worst position with the best position.
“The register is useless on the allocator compilers,” the gods took a pinch on social media, exposed the compiler disabilities.
Regardless of the cavets, focusing this renewed focus on low-level coding has led to fresh conversation around the performance optimization.
FFMPEG VLC has everything pure everything from media player to YouTube downloader tool, so small improvements in separate filters may also be widely waved through widely used software.
However, it is worth noting that such results are often difficult to repeat and apply in broad parts of the codebase.
Although such deep adaptations are impressive, they cannot reflect real -world reforms for editing footage of everyday users with video editing software.
FFMPEG’s promise may be limited to technical benchmark until other main functions receive equal treatment.
Through Tomshardware
